Category: language

Needing a Translator

We’d been skyping for months, both really enjoying it, I think — my husband kept noticing how much laughter was coming from the room where the really big computer lives. I was translating Lambert’s...

Apple Treachery

I have long assumed that virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI) were related in some vague way. I’ve gradually come to understand them as opposites, and more, possibly, good guys and bad guys....

Writing and Responding

Braiding Sweetgrass (2015) is a book about the contemporary relationship between plants and people.  More specifically, it is about the conflict and potential reconciliation between a botanical, scientific, written understanding of plants, and the orally transmitted...

The Measurement Problem

Is there a problem?  There is.  It concerns the relationship of the measurer to the measured, the scientist (or her measuring tools) to whatever-is-being-measured.  Philosophers tend to view it as the relationship of subject to object, noting...

Winning and losing…what?

I’ve agreed to review this new book, Co-illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (MIT, 2020), for Source Magazine, a journal of contemporary photography. It’s a very short review — just 300 words —...